The Redwood Valley wildfire on October 9th, 2017, burned through Ian’s family farm in the middle of the night, fueled by drought and hurricane-force “diablo” winds. Over 1000 people lost homes that night, including over a dozen in Ian’s family, and 9 people died from the flames. Wildfires are increasing in frequency and intensity around the world due to climate change, which will continue until we turn the Earth climate positive. Photo copyright Nathan Chance Franck, 2017.

Much has changed from when we started working on this book a couple years ago. The United States has now passed comprehensive climate legislation for the first time, joining Europe, China, and most of the world’s other major economies to subsidize dozens of different climate solution technologies to tipping points that can catalyze scale. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has also highlighted the geopolitical and economic risks of fossil fuel dependency, driving record demand for electric vehicles, renewables, and energy efficiency technologies. Real climate progress is finally being made, in many cases spurred on by tragic events and suffering, but there are still major gaps between rhetoric and realities, and global emissions continue to rise. As we’ll discuss in more detail, “Net Zero by 2050” is likely at least a decade too late to reach Paris Agreement targets, and it is still far from the climate-positive targets needed to stop and reverse the climate damages from which millions of people are already suffering.

There is also increasing awareness our climate crisis is not primarily an environmental problem, it is first and foremost a human problem, and a problem enmeshed in tremendous social and economic inequity. While we’re both scientists and technologists at heart, our climate solution work around the world has highlighted that climate inequities are everywhere, and often the roots of the problem. Denying the links that climate pollution and climate impacts have to structural classism, racism and colonialism is as wrong as denying the fundamentals of climate science. Climate solutions that fail to incorporate climate justice considerations are often not real or saleable solutions. Understanding and addressing climate justice issues is essential for scaling technologies and policies that move climate in the right direction, while solving climate is also essential for achieving every one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Climate change is the biggest collective challenge humanity has ever faced. The problem is difficult in part because temperature changes are driven by changes in cumulative greenhouse gas emissions. The longer we wait to fix the problem, the more difficult fixing it becomes, and the faster our rate of change needs to be to stabilize global temperatures. It is more complicated still because almost every human activity generates greenhouse gas emissions, so the needed scope of change is unlike anything that has come before.

We’re already committed to some warming from past emissions of greenhouse gases, so as Professor John Holdren has said for years, humanity’s choices for response are threefold: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering. The world will do some of each of these in coming decades, but how much of each we do is up to us.

The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation and suffering we’ll impose on our descendants. Adaptation is hard to do unless you know exactly what’s going to happen, and the current path we’re on is likely to be so disruptive that we will have a hard time adapting fast enough. In addition, ecosystems can’t adapt as rapidly as we’re currently changing the climate, and there’s little we can do for them except mitigate as rapidly as we can. Suffering, of course, is what remains if we fail.

For all these reasons, the main focus of this book is on climate mitigation (reducing emissions), though we touch on aspects of climate adaptation and resilience as well. Preserving a stable climate will require unprecedented and rapid changes around the globe, but most people have no idea just how big and fast these changes need to be.

Another reason the climate problem is complicated is because the fossil fuel industry and other large polluters have had more than a century to rig systems in their favor. Most technical treatments of climate solutions ignore or gloss over this reality, but we make it central to our analysis.

Stoddard et al. [3] addresses this question head on in their 2021 article “Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven't We Bent the Global Emissions Curve?” That article shows the power of status quo interests to frame the debate and stymie progress on an important problem, using myriad techniques to delay climate action. Related to that power is deep-seated (but often invisible) corruption and regulatory capture enabled by the vast revenues of the most powerful industry in human history (about $5T US/year at last count). Perverse incentives from small but powerful groups that profit from climate pollution continue to spread disinformation, deliberately obscuring climate truths from the public while blocking policy progress. Confronting this corruption is central to stabilizing the climate, a theme to which we return later in the book.

This book grew out of a class we developed and taught at Stanford University’s Earth Systems Program in 2017 and 2018 titled “Implementing Climate Solutions at Scale”. It had as its primary goal teaching students quantitative and qualitative methods for understanding the rate and scope of change needed to truly face the climate challenge. Each student (or group of students) produced and presented a project for a state, region, or country that achieved net zero emissions by the middle of the twenty-first century, assessing potential emissions reductions in different sectors, based on the resources and characteristics of the geographic unit under study.

Our class didn’t focus on estimating total costs of emissions reductions, as that is a complicated task not well suited to a one-quarter class (the students had their hands full with the emissions reductions side of the equation). We did encourage students to use cost-effectiveness assessments in choosing emissions reduction options, we just didn’t require that they add up all the costs and benefits, because that would have been too much to ask for this introductory class.

Our intended audience

This book introduces tools for understanding how to reduce emissions rapidly, hitting net zero emissions no later than 2040, then pushing beyond to remove carbon from the atmosphere and reduce carbon dioxide concentrations to those of the stable climate in which human civilization developed. We’ve written this book first and foremost as a resource for professors and advanced undergraduate and graduate students ready to teach and learn the key analytical tools needed to create a climate-positive world. We hope self-motivated investors, entrepreneurs, policymakers, climate solution practitioners and others who want to learn these skills on their own will also find this book useful.

What will readers learn?

This book goes beyond our original courses to provide a more comprehensive framework for solving climate change than we’ve found elsewhere. We include an overview of climate solution technologies, as well as analytical tools necessary to identify solutions that really work. We also explore what’s needed to align incentives, mobilize money, and elevate truth in climate conversations, key pillars of climate action that are often overlooked by techno-centric discussions of global emissions reductions.

Some of the tools we cover include:

• Emissions inventories and country-wide energy balances

• Decomposition tools to understand historic and future scenarios

• Technology costing studies for emissions reductions

• Climate “wedges”

• Life-cycle assessment (LCA) methodologies

• Financial modeling tools that integrate and assess sustainability

• Whole-system, clean-slate integrated design

• Social and environmental tradeoff analysis

• Climate adaptation and resilience strategies

Learning by doing only happens if you DO, so the book focuses on how to put these tools and associated data to work in student projects.

The structure of the book

As explained in Chapter 2, we organize the book around the overarching goal of achieving net- zero emissions by 2040, making the world climate positive thereafter. We present three key high- level ideas for stabilizing the climate: Ending fossil fuels, minimizing non-fossil emissions, and creating a climate-positive biosphere. We then elaborate on eight pillars of climate stabilization, laid out in detail in chapters 4 through 11.

This book is divided into thirteen chapters and seven appendices:

Chapter 1 – Introduction to the climate problem (short form): The continued orderly development of human civilization requires that the world reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero as fast as possible, starting now. This chapter explains the evidence and rationale for that point of view, in shorter form than in Appendix A.

Chapter 2 – Introduction to climate solutions: This chapter offers a comprehensive vision of how to stabilize the climate and describes the eight pillars of climate action, which we use to structure the book.

Chapter 3 – Tools of the trade: This chapter summarizes how to create emissions reduction plans using emissions inventories, then how to turn those inventories into projections of future emissions for different scenarios.

Chapter 4 – Electrify (almost) everything: This chapter draws upon the latest research and field experience to describe how to electrify virtually all energy end-uses, which is the single most important measure to end fossil fuels.

Chapter 5 – Decarbonize electricity: This chapter describes technologies, policies, and business practices needed to move electricity generation to zero emissions, while increasing total generation three to four-fold in coming decades.

Chapter 6 – Minimize non-fossil emissions: The oft neglected non-fossil emissions really need to be tackled for climate stabilization, and addressing the short-lived non-fossil pollutants is a way to slow increases in global warming in the near term.

Chapter 7 – Efficiency and optimization: This chapter focuses on efficiency in the broadest sense, that of optimizing energy, capital, and materials flows while reducing emissions to zero.

Chapter 8 – Remove carbon: This chapter discusses the prospects and pitfalls of technologies that promise to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Chapter 9 – Align incentives: We’ll need to re-design markets and re-align incentives throughout the society to reflect the goal of getting to zero emissions as soon as possible.

Chapter 10 – Mobilize money: Solving the climate problem means replacing high- emissions infrastructure with capital and technology. Financial innovation can help smooth that transition.

Chapter 11 – Elevate truth: Elevating truth and fighting disinformation, apathy, and cynicism are critical to a successful transition to a climate-positive society.

Chapter 12 – Bringing it all together: Planning for a climate-positive future involves complex tradeoffs of timing, logistics, and economics. This chapter introduces students to some of those tradeoffs and how to think rigorously about them.

Chapter 13 – Truly facing the climate challenge: This concluding chapter describes reasons for hope in the face of a truly daunting societal problem, and describes best practices for solving and discussing the climate problem.

Appendix A – Introduction to the climate problem (long form): The continued orderly development of human civilization requires that the world reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero as fast as possible, starting now. This chapter explains the evidence and rationale for that point of view, including more graphs and detail than in Chapter 1.

Appendix B – Detailed example on modeling capital stock growth and turnover: This appendix presents an example you can copy for your own model of capital stocks.

Appendix C – Why much existing fossil capital will need to retire: This appendix explains why we can’t stabilize the climate without retiring existing fossil capital.

Appendix D – Expanded Kaya decomposition: This appendix presents the expanded Kaya decomposition shown in Chapter 3.

Appendix E – Proper treatment of primary energy: This appendix explains why some conventions for calculating primary energy are misleading when the world is transitioning to non-combustion generation.

Appendix F – Revenues from top fossil fuel companies and the tobacco industry: This appendix documents revenues from fossil fuel and tobacco industries in 2019.

Appendix G – The effect of carbon prices on existing coal-fired electricity generation and retail gasoline prices: This appendix shows the effect of a $10/tonne carbon dioxide charge on electricity generation and retail gasoline prices to illustrate why carbon taxes are far more effective at changing the utility sector generation mix than in affecting small consumer behavior.

The material in each chapter supports a lecture or two in our class. We incorporate figures for each topic area into power point slides for teachers to incorporate into their own lectures as they see fit. We also create spreadsheets showing example emissions scenarios from which students can learn.

Each chapter gives lists suggested readings. References and footnotes lead to more detailed sources for those who want to learn more. At the beginning of each chapter is a summary of key conclusions to introduce what readers will learn. We also post a template and some advice about student projects at http://www.solveclimate.org, alongside a collection of climate solution action checklists for government, company, investor, donor, and community decisionmakers.

How to use this book

Professors who want to build a course around this book can use the material in each chapter as the basis for lectures, supplemented by examples drawn from their own experience.

General readers can read the book straight through. Those in a hurry should read Chapters 1 and 2 then the summary at the beginning of each succeeding chapter. They can conclude by reading Chapters 12 and 13.

How to contact us

We encourage readers to contact us with their comments, ideas, and thoughts about how the book could be improved for a 2nd edition. You can contact Jon via his website, Ian via LinkedIn, and both of us via solveclimate.org.

Jonathan Koomey & Ian Monroe
Bay Area, California and Redwood Valley, California, USA
Date: August 30, 2022

We are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP.”

— Paul Hawken